Homeland Security: All Your Laptops Are Belong To UsHomeland Security: All Your Laptops Are Belong To Us

The gropers at the Department of Homeland Security, not content with patting you down and rummaging through your underwear, now say that they can confiscate electronics brought into the United States for any reason, anytime, and share the devices and their contents with anybody.The Washington Post reports:

Translation into plain English: Homeland Security can take your stuff for any reason ("without suspicion of wrongdoing"), for however long it wants to ("unspecified period of time").

Translation: DHS can share the information on your electronic devices with anyone it wants to share the information with ("other agencies and private entities").

Interestingly, the Post quotes the DHS regulation as covering "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form." While the Post lists only electronic devices and their associated documentation as examples, books and other paper documents are also "device(s) capable of storing information in... analog form." Does the DHS also have the authority to confiscate books and paper documents?

It gets worse: "Reasonable measures must be taken to protect business information and attorney-client privileged material, the policies say, but there is no specific mention of the handling of personal data such as medical and financial records."

The DHS claims it's protecting against terrorist, drug smugglers, people sneaking kiddie porn into the country, and people violating copyright and trademark laws. Questions: Is this behavior by bad guys common? Common enough to warrant the expenditure of work, tax dollars, and infringement on people's privacy that these measures call for? And how are the border guards going to recognize trademark and copyright infringement when they see it? How are they going to distinguish a stash of legally ripped MP3s from pirated music? What kind of training do the border guards get in intellectual property law?

News.com's Declan McCullagh advises encrypting laptop contents when crossing the border, and has more advice for customs-proofing your laptop.

Lifehacker's Gina Trapani says leave the laptop home. Instead, put your necessary files on a thumb drive, or make the files accessible remotely and grab copies when you reach your destination. This strategy can work even if you choose to bring your laptop across the border -- put the files on a thumb drive, or make them remotely accessible, and that way you'll still have the information even if the border guards decide to swipe your laptop.

Techdirt notes that wrongdoers can simply ship illicit data in over networks. Indeed, any of the measures that McCullagh and Trapani advise also can be used by the bad guys -- encrypting data, leaving it home and remote-accessing it, putting it on a thumb drive.

Techdirt quotes the Heritage Foundation defending the DHS policies, arguing that it's unreasonable to require probable cause for searches and confiscation, what with the millions of people who cross the border every day. And yet this is not a problem inside the United States, where there are hundreds of millions of people.

In the name of protecting America, the TSA has demonstrated a lack of respect for the privacy, property, and dignity of Americans, with recent behavior including taking out nipple rings, pantsing amputees, and confiscating a homemade battery that looked like a bomb -- then bragging about it. The DHS simply cannot be trusted with the authority to confiscate electronics anywhere, at any time, for any reason, at any border crossing in America.